Death penalty is not easy to get in Chester County

WEST CHESTER — How hard is it to win a death penalty conviction in Chester County?

The numbers say that it is fairly difficult, if not nearly impossible. In the more than three decades since the death penalty was reinstated in the late 1970s in Pennsylvania, only three criminal defendants who were tried in the county were sentenced to death.

That compares with two defendants from Delaware County and five and six each from Montgomery County and Bucks County, respectively, and dozens and dozens from Philadelphia.

York County, smaller in population than Chester County, has almost a dozen prisoners on death row.

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But those numbers are misleading if cited to show the reluctance of jurors here to impose the ultimate punishment, said an attorney who has studied the death penalty issue nationally and who has tried one of the more recent death penalty cases in the county to go to a jury.

Nathan Schenker, the county’s first assistant public defender, said factors other than the attitudes and compositions of county juries explain why the numbers of death penalty sentences from the suburban Philadelphia region are relatively low.

“I don’t think it is hard to get a death penalty in any of those counties,” Schenker said in an interview at his office in the count’s Justice Center last week. The questions were put to him as a panel of seven men and five women were listening to evidence in the murder case against Laquanta Chapman, a Coatesville man being tried to the 2008 murder of a city teenager, an alleged crime for which the prosecution is seeking he death penalty.

Death penalty juries in the county, he said, had many times decided not to convict the defendant on first-degree murder charges, which would then result in consideration of whether to impose a death sentence. Instead, they have found defendant guilty of second-degree murder, for which the sentence is life in prison without parole and for which the death penalty is not an option.

In other cases, the quality of the defense representation was enough to convince the jurors not to agree with the prosecution and find in favor of the death penalty, he said.

Schenker maintained that the way the death penalty system works in Pennsylvania and other states is skewed to predispose juries to favor that option, and moreover to be inclined to view defendants in such cases as guilty even before hearing the evidence against them. “I don’t think juries are hesitant at all to give the death penalty” when they are confronted with that option, he said.

In Chester County, the three men who are on Death Row are Robert Hughes, a Delaware County man who shot and killed two employees at a West Goshen McDonald’s where he had worked; Darrick Hall, a Philadelphia man who murdered a Coatesville Laundromat manager during a botched armed robbery; and Dennis Lee Miller, the husband from London Grove who raped and stabbed his wife to death in their Chatham home.

Hughes was sentenced to death in 1990 by Judge Thomas Gavin, who heard the case without a jury. Miller, too, was given a death sentence by a county judge, Howard F. Riley Jr., after a non-jury trial in 1997. Only Hall was sentenced by a county jury, in 1994, in a case that was prosecuted by then-District Attorney Anthony Sarcione, who is now a Common Pleas Court judge.

Not all murder cases are eligible for the death penalty. One of the more recent notorious murder cases in the count involves Morgan Marie Mengel, the West Goshen woman accused of manipulating her young lover into bludgeoning her husband to death after he poisoned him with a toxic Snapple beverage. But she does not face the death penalty.

Only those cases in which the prosecution can cite one of 18 “aggravating factors” can be certified as death penalty cases. Those factors include the killing of a police officer or fireman, a case involving torture, or a killing committed in the course of another felony, such as rape or robbery.

In Chapman’s case, the prosecution has cited his past criminal record of violent felonies.

Schenker noted that in Chester County, the prosecution has been willing in many cases to drop the death penalty against a defendant in exchange for a guilty play of first-degree murder. That occurred in the case of an Upper Uwchlan man, James John Hvizda, who Schenker had represented after he stabbed his estranged wife to death in the parking lot of a Wawa in Eagle where she worked. He is now serving a life sentence.

In two recent county death penalty cases presented to a jury, both times the jurors decided not to impose the penalty. In 2000, Charles “Duffy” Linton, who was represented by Schenker and assistant public defender David Miller, was sentenced to life in prison for the shooting death of a gasoline truck driver in Downingtown. And in 2006, Antonio Dupree Thomas was spared capital punishment in the contract death of a Coatesville man.